Google and Apple are clashing with the EU over AI assistants: What to know

A major corporate compliance battle is unfolding between the European Union and tech giants Google and Apple over who controls the future of smartphone artificial intelligence around the world. The European Commission is now cracking down on how these companies manage AI assistants.

Apple and Google have long governed the smartphone market commanding a combined total of roughly 5 billion active Android phones and iPhones globally.

As AI continues to become more specialized, the two prominent tech giants are enabling their AI assistants to execute tasks rather than just answer questions.

It's now demanding that Google give other AI agents expanded access to Android by July 2027. The European Commission believes this new mandate could level the playing field in the AI race. According to Omdia, about 427 million iphones and Android phones fall under EU regulations.

Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and director of the AI & Human Rights program said: “I would say that we have to take these tech companies’ arguments with a grain of salt and look at whether they’ve cared about privacy up to the point where suddenly a decision was affecting them in ways they don’t like.”

Experts agree that granting software permissions to access Apple’s and Google’s operating systems could jeopardize security and user privacy. Indeed, some argue that privacy is Google’s principal motivation for pushing back on the EU’s rules.

Apple said its proposed solutions were rejected by the US, but it will continue to work with them.

The European Commission also underlined significant questions over privacy in the AI era. It involves several challenges that tech companies and regulators face in solving them. 

Google said in a statement that if agents are granted these types of permissions, Samsung would be the ones to make key decisions.

Technological progress has historically required some type of privacy tradeoff such as granting location permission for more accurate recommendations. 

AI systems are often trained by data harvesting data from the internet which could include a user’s personal information without their knowledge.